The women's

association football Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 players who primarily use their feet to propel the ball around a rectangular field called a pitch. The objective of the game is ...

tournament at the 2008 Summer Olympics was held in

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

and four other cities in China from 6 to 21 August. Associations affiliated with FIFA were invited to send their full women's national teams. For these Games, the women competed in a 12-team tournament. Preliminary matches commenced on 6 August, two days before the Opening Ceremony of the Games. The teams were grouped into three pools of four teams each for a round-robin preliminary round. The top two teams in each pool, as well as the best two third-place finishing teams, advanced to an eight-team single-elimination bracket. The tournament was won by the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

, which beat

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

1–0 in the gold medal game. Carli Lloyd scored the game-winning goal in the 96th minute for the

, which collected their third Olympic gold medal.

Qualifying

Participating countries in women's football at the 2008 Olympics

A National Olympic Committee may enter one women's team for the football competition. * Note – The three best ranked European teams at the FIFA Women's World Cup qualified for the Olympics. However, the third best team England could not participate, because England competes at the Olympic Games as part of Great Britain, which does not compete in football. Therefore, the fourth European team would advance, requiring a play-off between Sweden and

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Venues

The tournament was held in five venues across five cities: *

Workers' Stadium The Workers' Stadium (), often called Gongti, Gong Ti or Kung T'i, is a multi-purpose stadium in the Chaoyang District of north-eastern Beijing, China. It was mostly used for association football matches. The stadium was built in 1959 and was l ...

* Qinhuangdao Olympic Sports Center Stadium,

Qinhuangdao Qinhuangdao (; ) is a port city on the coast of China in northern Hebei. It is administratively a prefecture-level city, about east of Beijing, on the Bohai Sea, the innermost gulf of the Yellow Sea. Its population during the 2020 national ...

Shanghai Stadium The Shanghai Stadium () is a multi-purpose stadium in Shanghai. Between 2009 and 2019, the stadium hosted home matches of the Chinese Super League team Shanghai SIPG. History The stadium opened on 14 March 1999 when the eighth National Games o ...

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flowin ...

Shenyang Olympic Sports Center Stadium The Shenyang Olympic Sports Center Stadium () is a 60,000-seat multi-purpose stadium in Shenyang, Liaoning, China. Nicknamed "Crystal Crown" 水晶皇冠, the stadium was built by AXS Satow as a replacement for Wulihe Stadium. It hosted football ...

, Shenyang *

Tianjin Olympic Center Stadium The Tianjin Olympic Center (), often colloquially referred to as the Water Drop (), is a sports complex with a multi-use stadium in Tianjin, China. Construction started in August 2003 and was completed in August 2007. It is the home stadium of Tian ...

Tianjin Tianjin (; ; Mandarin: ), alternately romanized as Tientsin (), is a municipality and a coastal metropolis in Northern China on the shore of the Bohai Sea. It is one of the nine national central cities in Mainland China, with a total popu ...

Seeding

Squads

The women's tournament is a full international tournament with no restrictions on age. Each nation must submit a squad of 18 players by 23 July 2008. A minimum of two goalkeepers (plus one optional alternate goalkeeper) must be included in the squad.

Match officials

Group stage

Group winners and runners-up, plus two best third place teams advanced to quarter final round. Groups are lettered sequentially from the last letter in the Men's Football tournament (which has Groups A through D). All times are

China Standard Time The time in China follows a single standard time offset of UTC+08:00 (eight hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time), even though the country spans almost five geographical time zones. The official national standard time is called ''Beijing T ...

(

UTC+8 UTC+08:00 is an identifier for a time offset from UTC of +08:00. With an estimated population of 1.708 billion living within the time zone, roughly 24% of the world population, it is the most populous time zone in the world, as well as a ...

)

Group E

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Group F

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Group G

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Ranking of third-placed teams

Knockout stage

Quarter-finals

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Semi-finals

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Bronze medal match

Gold medal match

Statistics

Goalscorers

Assists

FIFA Fair Play Award

China PR China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

won the FIFA Fair Play Award, given to the team with the best record of fair play during the tournament. Every match in the tournament was taken into account, though only teams that reached the knockout stage were eligible to win the award.

Tournament ranking

References

External links

Olympic Football Tournaments Beijing 2008 - Women
FIFA.com

* * *
FIFA Technical Report
{{DEFAULTSORT:Football At The 2008 Summer Olympics - Women's Tournament

2008 File:2008 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Lehman Brothers went bankrupt following the Subprime mortgage crisis; Cyclone Nargis killed more than 138,000 in Myanmar; A scene from the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing; ...

Oly Oly may refer to: * Oly, informal name for Olympia, Washington, United States * OLY (: ), postnominals granted to participants in the Olympics People with the name * Oly (born 1992), American singer-songwriter and musician * Oly Hicks (born 1968 ...

Women's events at the 2008 Summer Olympics